4 ms·

Just curious, with your 5 years with financial companies do you see them do things differently than most organisations? eg.. deadlines?, SLA?, tech-understandin

by hackits 10y ago

Just curious, with your 5 years with financial companies do you see them do things differently than most organisations? eg.. deadlines?, SLA?, tech-understanding? I had a couple of colleges working for the banking financial sector and they where pretty high strung most of the time. They where a bit more direct in regards to putting money on the table to get shit done.

Roboprog 10y ago
I worked in a smaller, "high value investor" unit, within a parent mutual fund company. It was very much not a tech company, although there were a few good people in the org. There was of course a big focus on buying supported packages, and off-shoring as much as possible. I understand buying "non core competency commodities", but the off shoring was dubious. The custom stuff in my unit was very much neglected, except for integration projects when changing vendors, which of course have to happen when you move some of your dependencies. Anyway, uptime was VERY important, which also implies a fair amount of risk management/reduction. In fairness, buying external services does make costs much more predictable. However, if you are on the vendor side of this, you need to make sure you build in pricing to cover what will be a very demanding customer.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  Offshoring fun & games: another team bought this expensive Java caching service thing from IBM. They did not bother to learn how to properly code the fetches so that the calls included "cache miss" logic to get missing items (d'oh!). Whenever they restarted the web site, they had to first spend N minutes running a custom program to regenerate the "cache" content. I suspect they didn't really understand the definition of "cache" :-) (they of course did some other ignorant things which made this an issue, as well)

4 ms·

Just curious, with your 5 years with financial companies do you see them do things differently than most organisations? eg.. deadlines?, SLA?, tech-understandin

by hackits 10y ago

Roboprog 10y ago
I worked in a smaller, "high value investor" unit, within a parent mutual fund company. It was very much not a tech company, although there were a few good people in the org. There was of course a big focus on buying supported packages, and off-shoring as much as possible. I understand buying "non core competency commodities", but the off shoring was dubious. The custom stuff in my unit was very much neglected, except for integration projects when changing vendors, which of course have to happen when you move some of your dependencies. Anyway, uptime was VERY important, which also implies a fair amount of risk management/reduction. In fairness, buying external services does make costs much more predictable. However, if you are on the vendor side of this, you need to make sure you build in pricing to cover what will be a very demanding customer.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  Offshoring fun & games: another team bought this expensive Java caching service thing from IBM. They did not bother to learn how to properly code the fetches so that the calls included "cache miss" logic to get missing items (d'oh!). Whenever they restarted the web site, they had to first spend N minutes running a custom program to regenerate the "cache" content. I suspect they didn't really understand the definition of "cache" :-) (they of course did some other ignorant things which made this an issue, as well)